Electronic communications, whether over a local or wide-area network or among components of a local bus, can involve a variety of programmed actions and protocols. For instance, data to be transmitted from one electronic component to another is often organized into subgroups of transmitted information. A system of acknowledgments is often employed to coordinate transmission of respective subgroups of the information and for identifying and retransmitting lost subgroups, to provide reliability.
In the network context, information is often transmitted by one or more packets of data. The packets are organized into a particular form, with a payload that stores one or more subgroups of the data, and with transmission control information to facilitate routing the packet to a proper destination. The transmission control information can comprise a header, a tail, etc., in which this transmission control information can be specified. This information can include data for identifying the packet (e.g., within a group of packets, such as a stream), identifying a transmitting component, identifying a recipient component, and so on.
Once data is prepared for transmission, the data is provided to a device configured to generate signals to convey the data over a communication path, such as a bus, a network, and so on. As a particular example, in the context of optical signal communication, a serializer/deserializer (SerDes) might be employed for generating such signals and transmitting the signals over a communication path. The SerDes is a device configured to convert a stream(s) of serial information into multiple parallel streams of the information, or convert the multiple parallel streams of the information into the stream of serial information. The SerDes can often be utilized to facilitate preparing a set of data for transmission by a sending component, or in receiving transmitted data at a receiving component.
Electronic communication circuitry, like many electronic components, is often tested by a manufacturer in conjunction with quality control procedures. Automated test equipment (ATE), for instance, is a device that can be connected to an electronic communication chip for such purposes. The ATE can have various functions and configurations, and can include a load board for matching to various test pin configurations, including a particular test pin configuration of a test pin field of the electronic communication chip. In some cases, an ATE load board simply expands an input/output of a device under test to the pins on the ATE load board. In other cases, an ATE load board can have additional components added to the ATE load board to meet particular test requirements of the electronic device. For instance, passive components such as capacitors or resistors can be added to implement filters external to the device under test, or the like.
Though an ATE can be reconfigured to some degree to meet particular requirements of a device under test, reconfiguration can be time-consuming, significantly delaying or adding overhead to otherwise automated test processes. Therefore, capabilities of quality control test equipment are often improved to match the capabilities of electronic circuitry. This can add significant cost overhead to testing equipment, however, as consumer demand for electronic circuitry often requires increasing capabilities of the underlying test equipment. Thus, to match changes in capabilities of test equipment, the testing equipment can require periodic upgrades. This is a particular aspect of current research and development that is often overlooked but of significant importance in electronic components.